Monday, September 27, 2004

Tribe Admits Wrongdoing

Laurence Tribe has already admitted that he failed to use proper attribution in his 1985 book God Save This Honorable Court. Despite Tribe's admission of wrongdoing, Charles Ogletree -- who has such good judgment in such matters -- has pronounced the allegation against Tribe to be "nonsense." And in a sense it is, but only if one's standard of comparison is the grossly egregious and unscholarly behavior of Ogletree himself. Alan Dershowitz also chimed in with this:

Dershowitz said yesterday that The Standard’s charges against Tribe were politically motivated.

“Show me the man, and I’ll find you the crime,” Dershowitz said — a quotation he attributed to Soviet spymaster Lavrenti Beria. “Clearly someone was looking to pin something on the most prominent liberal constitutional scholar in the country.”

A desperate move by a skilled defense lawyer. When you have no factual basis on which to argue, challenge the other side's motives.